Yesterday afternoon, I got a call from Nick’s caregiver saying the water in the pool was getting very high from the downpour we were having. She told me what the level was, and I told her it could wait but to keep me posted. I called in about an hour, and she said she had just been getting ready to call me. I told her I would leave work, run by Fresh Market, and come home to take let some water out of the pool.
Traffic is horrible, the water is ankle-deep on the streets, and I wonder if I should just go home, but I press on to Fresh Market. When I get there, I am happy because they have pretty carving pumpkins on sale, and I put a big one in my cart.
I go to the deli and wait and wait. No one is there, but the employees are doing other things and not looking at me. Another lady joins me, and we wait together. Then a man comes up, and suddenly an employee notices and waits on him, without asking who was first. The lady and I look at each other in a can-you-believe-this way, and I say, “I’m going to get the other employee.” So I walk down the counter and call to him, using not my inside voice, not my outside, voice but my auditorium voice and undoubtedly sounding annoyed, “Excuse me, sir, can you help me down here?”
This guy, maybe mid-twenties, just loses it. “No! And you can’t talk to me like that! You have to speak to me RESPECTFULLY!”
Me: I mean no disrespect. I just want some help over here.
Him: It’s not my job! I do the CHEESE! Respect is a TWO WAY STREET! Why can’t you walk over HERE to talk to me?
Me, knowing I am in an alternate universe: Because I am over here. And I am a customer. And your job is to help customers.
Him: Don’t TELL me what my job is. You don’t KNOW what my job is.
All this is taking place at an elevated decibel level in a suddenly quiet store. Fresh Market is a small store, and my Auditorium Voice and Cheese Boy’s Hissy Fit Voice fill it easily. The butcher comes over in his apron and tells the cheese guy to calm down and let it go, that he’s attracting attention.
Cheese Boy: (To butcher) “No! I don’t care!” (To me) And I should have been CLOCKED OUT FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO.
Me: And I shoud care about this?
The exchange is clearly winding down. Cheese Boy takes off his apron and stalks to the back room.
The second deli man, finished with his customer, comes over. “Ma’am, I am so very, very sorry. I apologize. What can I help you with?”
I give him my order. “What’s wrong with Mr. Charm?”
“Well, he’s a little touchy.”
The deli man and the lady who was waiting with me are saying kind and comforting things to me, so I figure I did not come across entirely as Ogre Lady.
I ask to see the manager when I go up to the checkout. In the maybe 30 seconds that it takes the cashier to get him and return, about five employees just happen to find things to do in the immediate area. As I tell the manager an abbreviated version of the story (and trust me, the version here is abbreviated too), I hear the employees saying things like “Gee, I wonder who that was?”
When I end by telling the manager that Cheese Guy is a rude little snotnose, one of the women standing nearby bursts into laughter. The manager says he will take care of it. I thank him.
Before I go, the woman who laughed asks me to tell her one more time what I called the guy. I oblige.
Jerry Seinfeld had his Soup Nazi. Apparently I have the Cheese Nazi.
Was this the end of my woes? No. When I got home, we had a power outage, and I can’t drain the pool without power. When it finally came on, it was dark. I went out in the dark and the rain, and the pool pump would not catch. I had to take the leaf basket out of the intake valve and move a flap that sometimes closes for some unknown reason. While I was doing that, the leaf basket slid into the pool on the wet pavement and sank to the bottom. It is still there.
It was not my afternoon.